How to copy or merge Blogs into a single Blog / Community

Problem Description

Problem 1: Multiple Blogs need to be merged into a single one.

Problem 2: One or more Blogs need to be moved into a Community

Solution with Websphere Commandline Interface

HCL Connections does not provide any tools for moving / merging / copying Blogs. You need to write your own code that either modifies the relevant tables of the BLOGS database directly, or which uses the REST API to create the new Blog.

Solution with Connections Administration Toolkit (CAT)

Navigate to Content And Access – Blogs. There, you can create a list which contains all Blogs that are part of the merge / copy operation.

Problem 1: If you want to merge the selected Blogs into an entirely new one, use the “Copy Blogs” function. If you want to merge the selected Blogs into one of the selected set, use the “Merge Blogs” function.

Problem 2: To move one or more Blogs into a Community, you first need to make sure the Blogs widget in that Community is activated. The widget is activated by selecting the widget in the Connections UI when customizing the community. This action can be performed by any Community owner. To perform the action yourself, simply add yourself to the community as owner with the help of CAT (done in Content And Access – Communities). Activating the Blogs widget leads to the creation of a Community Blog with the same title as the Community (in the screenshot: “Internal Sales-Community”). Then you can use the “Merge Blogs” functionality like described in Problem 1.

When merging Blogs, you can choose which of the selected Blogs to merge.

The entries of all selected Blogs will be merged according to the dates they have been published. With “Up” and “Down”, you can make changes to the default order CAT has sorted the Blog entries into: